Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī

1Name, origin and the sources

His full name in ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī’s biographical dictionary of Indian scholars, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, is Muḥibb Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Shakūr al-ʿUthmānī al-Ṣiddīqī al-Ḥanafī al-Bihārī. He was born and grew up in Karā, a village in the district of Muḥibb ʿAlī Pūr in Bihar, and his clan was known as al-Malik. No source consulted gives the year of his birth. Nuzhat calls him ‘one of the famous clever men across the lands’.

Little is known about his life beyond his offices. Asad Q. Ahmed, who reconstructed his biography from the Indian sources, writes that ‘little more has been communicated in the sources about his life’. The main accounts are the Nuzhat entry, which cites the eighteenth-century Maʾāthir al-kirām for his death, Rahmi Yaran’s article in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, and Ahmed’s chapter. Where they differ, this is noted below.

2Teachers and intellectual lineage

Nuzhat says that al-Bihārī read some of the madrasa books with Quṭb al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm al-Anṣārī al-Sihālawī (d. 1103/1692) and most of them with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī al-Shamsābādī (d. 1121/1709), himself a student of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī. An early commentator on the Sullam, Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Sihālawī, first calls al-Bihārī a student of Quṭb al-Dīn and then corrects himself: ‘Rather, he was a student of his student.’ The TDV names both men as his teachers.

Quṭb al-Dīn al-Sihālawī was the founder of the scholarly family later known as Farangī Maḥall. After he was murdered in 1103/1692, the emperor Awrangzīb gave his sons a building in Lucknow that had belonged to a European merchant, the Farangī Maḥall; one of those sons was Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn, after whom the madrasa course Dars-i Niẓāmī is named. Through his teachers, Ahmed shows, al-Bihārī belonged to a line of learning that went back to ʿAbd al-Salām al-Dīwī (d. 1040/1630), also the teacher of ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Siyālkūtī (d. 1067/1656–57), and beyond him to the circle of the Dashtakīs in ninth/fifteenth- and tenth/sixteenth-century Shīrāz. The Sullam therefore shows close knowledge of the Shīrāzī tradition of logic and of the seventeenth-century Indian debates around al-Siyālkūtī and Mīr Dāmād.

3Career under Awrangzīb

Al-Bihārī became known for his legal learning in the reign of Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr (r. 1069/1659–1118/1707). According to Nuzhat he travelled to the emperor’s camp in the Deccan, and Awrangzīb made him qāḍī (judge) of Lucknow and later transferred him to Hyderabad; the TDV dates the Hyderabad appointment to 1097/1685–86.

While he was qāḍī of Lucknow, the scholar Amān Allāh al-Banārasī (d. 1133/1721), a fellow student of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shamsābādī, held the office of ṣadr in the same city. Nuzhat says that ‘there passed between them discussions and exchanges that would fill the pages of books’. Ahmed points out that al-Banārasī wrote an arbitration between Mīr Dāmād and Maḥmūd al-Jawnpūrī on the question of ‘perpetual creation’ (ḥudūth dahrī), and suggests that it was in such debates that al-Bihārī came to know Mīr Dāmād’s al-Ufuq al-mubīn, which lies beneath some of the Sullam’s solutions.

Awrangzīb later removed him from his judgeship and appointed him tutor to Rafīʿ al-Qadr (d. 1124/1712), son of the prince Shāh ʿĀlam and so the emperor’s grandson. When Shāh ʿĀlam was made governor of Kabul, al-Bihārī went with him and his son and stayed there for some time; the TDV dates this to 1109/1697–98, the same year in which, according to the TDV, he finished Musallam al-thubūt.

4The last year

After Awrangzīb’s death in 1118/1707, Shāh ʿĀlam took the throne (as Bahādur Shāh I) and gave al-Bihārī his highest office. The sources describe it differently. Nuzhat says that Shāh ʿĀlam appointed him to the office of chief ṣadr (al-ṣadāra al-ʿuẓmā) and gave him the title Fāḍil Khān in 1119. The TDV says he was made chief qāḍī of India in 1118/1706–07 with the title Fāḍil Khān. Ahmed writes that he was appointed to the central ministry and given the title Fāḍil Khān. All agree that he died soon afterwards, in 1119/1707; the TDV says he died a few months after taking up the post. Francis Robinson gives his death as 1707–08.

His years of office fall exactly in the decades in which the Sullam was written and began to circulate. Ahmed notes that the two earliest commentaries were dedicated to imperial figures: al-Sāʾinpūrī’s to Nawwāb Khudābanda Khān, who also died in 1119/1707, and Fīrūz b. Maḥabba’s al-Sirāj al-wahhāj to Shāh ʿĀlam himself.

5Works

Ahmed observes that al-Bihārī’s writing seems to have been limited to legal theory, logic and philosophy. Nuzhat names three works as ‘accepted and current in the madrasas of the scholars’: Sullam al-ʿulūm in logic, Musallam al-thubūt in legal theory and al-Jawhar al-fard on the indivisible part (the atom). It adds two treatises: one on fallacies of general application (Risāla fī al-mughālaṭāt al-ʿāmmat al-wurūd), which the TDV says was printed with a commentary by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, and one arguing that ‘the school of the Ḥanafīs is further from personal opinion (raʾy) than that of the Shāfiʿīs, contrary to what is commonly held’. Nuzhat summarizes its arguments: the Ḥanafīs, for instance, treat general statements of the Qurʾān and Sunna as certain and so do not restrict them by analogy, and they accept mursal ḥadīths in preference to opinion.

Musallam al-thubūt is a detailed textbook of Ḥanafī legal theory, set against the Shāfiʿī tradition and combining the methods of the jurists and the theologians. According to the TDV, al-Bihārī first called it Musallam and later renamed it Musallam al-thubūt, a title whose letters give the year of writing, 1109/1697–98. After an introduction it treats logic, the theory of legal rulings and language, then the Qurʾān, the Sunna, consensus and analogy, and ends with independent reasoning (ijtihād) and following an authority (taqlīd). Ahmed notes its ‘heavy dose of kalām and logic’ and the programmatic way in which it sets Ḥanafī against Shāfiʿī positions. It entered the Indian madrasa course; Robinson lists it among the books on the principles of jurisprudence in the Dars-i Niẓāmī. Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn wrote two commentaries on it (Nuzhat), and ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm wrote Fawātiḥ al-raḥamūt, completed in 1180/1767, which was printed in Lucknow in 1878 and in the margins of al-Ghazālī’s al-Mustaṣfā at Būlāq in 1322/1904 and again in 1324/1906. The TDV also notes interest in the Musallam in Egypt.

Ahmed also mentions ‘some short treatises on logic’. Most important for the Sullam is the author’s own commentary on it, a set of glosses quoted, often without attribution, by all the early commentators. Its date is unknown; Ahmed thinks it may have been composed together with the text as a teaching aid. In his reading it was meant to guide future commentators toward the solution of the book’s difficulties rather than to resolve them fully. In it al-Bihārī explains, for example, what makes a mental consideration true ‘in itself’ (fī nafs al-amr).

6Students and legacy

The sources consulted name no regular students of al-Bihārī apart from his royal pupil Rafīʿ al-Qadr. His influence ran through his books. Within a few decades of his death the Sullam had become the most advanced logic book of the Indian course and the Musallam the most advanced book of legal theory, and both were taught and commented on chiefly by the scholars of Farangī Maḥall and their students: the Sullam by Mullā Niẓām al-Dīn’s circle, which produced its most famous commentators (see ‘The commentaries’), and the Musallam by Niẓām al-Dīn himself and his son Baḥr al-ʿUlūm. Ahmed counts more than a hundred Indian commentaries and supercommentaries on the Sullam written within about two hundred years.

Some points remain uncertain. The year of al-Bihārī’s birth and the exact date of the Sullam are unknown; the nature of his last office is described differently (chief ṣadr, chief qāḍī or central minister); and the year of his title Fāḍil Khān is given as 1118 or 1119. The English Wikipedia article on him also connects him with the compilation of the Fatāwā ʿĀlamgīriyya; none of the sources consulted here says so, and Ahmed mentions only that Muḥammad Dawlat, the father of the Sullam commentator Kamāl al-Dīn, worked on that compilation.